Comment by avabuildsdata
8 days ago
honestly the thing that trips me up is when codegen makes me feel productive but I haven't actually validated anything. like I'll have claude write a whole data pipeline in 20 minutes and then spend 2 hours debugging edge cases it didn't think about because it doesn't know our data
the speed is real but it mostly just moves where I spend my time. less typing, more reading and testing. which is... fine? but it's not the 10x thing people keep claiming
Would getting to the same edge-case-free outcome have taken you less than 2h20min if you didn't have AI?
I think it would typically have taken you longer.
> I think it would typically have taken you longer.
That's actually highly doubtful to me.
Tons of studies and writing about how reading and debugging code is wildly more time consuming than writing it. That time goes up even more when you're not the one that wrote the code in the first place. It's why we've spent decades on how to write readable/maintainable code.
So either all this shit about reading/maintaining code being difficult was lies and we've spent decades wasting our time or AIs can only improve productivity if you stop verifying/debugging code.
So I find it very unlikely that it would have taken more than a couple hours to just write it the first time.